Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (10 page)

“Always up,” she said, thinking out loud.

“It gets better, Lee,” Mikki said.

“It can hardly get worse,” she said softly.

“Wanna bet? Look at this.” The report riffled its virtual pages again, and showed her a bar graph: one very small sampling in green, another large one, much larger, in red—a curve not so much heading upward, as trying to launch itself out the top of the page. “That’s the last three years,” Mikki said. “That’s the number of murders across the worlds in which at least one other Alfen has been involved in the killing.”

“As victim?”

“No. As the murderer.”

It was bizarre. It made no sense. 
Why now? Why all of a sudden?
 “Could it be a statistical blip?” Lee said.

“If this were only one universe we were looking at, I’d be suspicious myself. But Lee, this is a master average. Five worlds: Midgarth’s out of the sample, since if you include it, the difference in the time constant makes it throw a false negative or false positive. If I knew anything about numbers”—and Mikki’s mouth drew into a tight line—”I’d think I was looking at some kind of conspiracy here…”

Gelert, looking over her shoulder at the graph, turned to look at her with his ears straight up in alarm, his eyes grave.

Lee sat thinking of a shape standing by a building’s corner, pulling the air aside, stepping into it, and began to think Mikki was right.

*4*

The office transport-sharing rotation made it Lee’s turn to take home the company hov. She drove home slowly, thinking, and found herself parked in front of the pink-stuccoed bungalow at the end of her little side street without any clear sense of how she’d gotten there. She got out of the hov, listening to it locking itself up as she glanced up and down the street in the predusk light.

The sky was dimming down to peach-color at the horizon, as much of it as she could see through the downhanging green fringe of the peppertrees behind her property; the air was full of their spicy smell. The street was quiet, the gardens and front yards of her neighbors going twilight-shadowed, some of their lawn sprinklers spitting rhythmically along now that night was coming on. Faintly, from down nearer the Boulevard, came shouts and laughter of children from the Belleclaires’ back yard, followed by a splash: a pool party running late.

Lee took a few long breaths and tried to recover some kind of feeling that this was the real world—that indeed most of the world was like this, at peace with itself, running not too badly, all things considered. It was too easy to forget the peace in the face of the work she did every day, where most of her attention was bent on the aftereffects of rage, cruelty, violence. Regrounding herself in a world that wasn’t all about the less positive side of the many humanities was never easy, but she had to make sure she did it every day, or at least tried.

Now Lee made her way slowly up her front walk, resolving yet again to do something about the lawn, which had been coming down with brown patches, and also to call somebody about the cracked third slab from the front porch, which someday would at least trip her, if not the milkman, thus causing her an unwanted expedition into accident/injury law. Lee paused by the porch steps to bend down and examine one of the two skinny, scrawny rosebushes that stood to either side of the end of the walk. One of them had a single, wizened pink rose on it, half open. This was something of an event, for even though Lee had spent recent months trying every kind of pruning, and every kind of fertilizer, until now the rosebushes had refused to do anything but produce leaves and an abundance of thorns.

“Hey, good for you,” she said, touching the outermost petals of the opening flower. Several of the petals had already had a hole chewed in them by some kind of bug, but Lee still had to smile at this small triumph. She bent down, sniffed, found no fragrance there. “Never mind,” she said, “you’re just getting started…”

As she walked up the steps with Mikki’s report under her arm, the house unlatched the front door for her. It was old, wood with three small glass windows, more trouble to take care of than a door made of one of the more modern armored laminates. But Lee liked it: it was of a piece with the rest of the bungalow, dating back to the middle of the last century—solid, a little clunky. The shades in the front and side windows rotated themselves into evening configuration as she stepped into the bookshelf-lined living room, and the lights came on for her, gleaming off the polished floorboards that had cost her so much time and sweat to strip, sand, and finish. Lee closed the door, slipped her jacket off and tossed it onto the brown leather sofa, and headed into the kitchen. There she paused for a moment, considering what she wanted for dinner. She briefly thought of making some pasta from scratch, 
orecchielle
 or something of the kind, but then dismissed the idea—it would take too much fiddly kneading for her present mood. Lee spoke open the sliding doors that led out onto the deck and started work on dinner.

She spread Mikki’s report out on the breakfast bar between her kitchen and dining area, glancing down at its pages while moving back and forth between the cooker and the fridge. Outside, the warm colors of the western sky cooled down to evening blues as Lee sautéed some mushrooms in olive oil, fished ground beef out of the freezer, stuck it into the fridge’s “active” compartment, and told the fridge to defrost it. She spent a while paging through the report, then went for the hamburger and crumbled it into the pan. While stirring it, Lee turned a page of the report, then went to get herself a glass of wine and came back to that page. It featured no graphs, but the word “recidivism” in a section heading caught her eye.

—numerous repeat offenses by Alfen individuals whom evidence indicates have committed similar
 
offenses in other jurisdictions. Additionally some repeat offenders have been assisted in escaping
 
custody by persons unknown and have reappeared in jurisdictions, especially in Xaihon, where
 
extradition is either problematic or impossible due to lack of local planetary political recognition
 
of such “umbrella” structures as the Five-Geneva Pact. The conclusion that organized crime is
 
involved in such escapes is supported only by circumstantial evidence, but cannot be discarded…

Lee turned away and went looking for some garlic. 
The same people
, she thought, finding the garlic safe empty: she sighed and went rooting in the spice rack on the counter for some garlic powder. 
But who
 
are they?
 She dosed the pan with the powdered garlic and stirred for a few moments more, then found a jar of spaghetti sauce, dumped it in with the meat, kept on stirring, and started paging back toward the appendices at the end of the report. It took another ten minutes or so, but by the time she was ready to put the spaghetti on, she had found the list of names of repeat offenders, ten or twelve people. Some of them didn’t actually have names, just case numbers; their descriptions and DNA evidence left behind were their only identification.
That’s some information I want to see
, Lee thought. 
Assuming I can
 
find a way to get my hands on it without revealing that I’ve seen this report. Probably Mikki can
 
help.

Lee filled a pot with hot water from the faucet and put it on to boil. 
And finally, why?
 she thought.
Who
 
stands to gain when Elves kill Elves?
 But then Lee shook her head and laughed out loud at her own witlessness. Who stood to gain when humans killed humans, for pity’s sake? Six  billion lives on just this world, six billion motivations: invariably when some of them intersected with others, there would be trouble. 
And after that, it gets complex.

She picked up her wineglass again and turned her attention back to the report. Among those suspects or convicts who had names, the details of their criminal histories varied; but there were a few congruences that Lee found peculiar. Three of them had at one time or another held government jobs—one an advisor of some kind in Midgarth’s Mass Relocation Authority; one a minor official in the Alfen consulate to Upas, a planet in Xainese space; one a former private secretary to the Alfen ambassador to Tierra—a kidnap victim, everyone had thought, until eight months after he vanished, an Elf matching his description came out of the dark on the south side of Chicago Grande one night and knifed another Elf in the back—

Lee frowned at that. 
Something else I need more data on. And what about these two—
 Two more suspects, with names rather than numbers: but both of them, before they killed and vanished, had been working for communications companies…as had their victims.

Now, is that just a coincidence?
 Lee thought. 
All right, ‘workplace murders,’ just personal animosities boiling over…that’s what some people would say. But do I buy it?

The pot was boiling. Lee pulled a big handful of spaghetti from the glass jar where it lived, threw back about a quarter of what she’d removed because she always overestimated how much she was about to make, and put the spaghetti in the water, watching it start to slump down. 
With dil’Sorden, that makes
 
three. I wonder, has ExTel lost any other Alfen staff recently? And how do I find out without
 
rousing Hagen’s interest?

Lee stirred the spaghetti a little and went back to the report again, paging first ahead and then back to see if there were any conclusions relating directly to this issue. There weren’t, at least not in black and white—and it occurred to Lee that however this report might have been assembled, its compilers were still somewhat nervous about the reactions of those who would eventually read it.

Criminal organizations have in the past attempted to influence or infiltrate communications or interworld transport technology groups, with their invariable links to the Alfen allotropic gold
 
industry, always attractive to such organizations because of the large profit margins possible in smuggling or clandestine trade operations. Further investigation should attempt to establish whether these murders are part of another such strategy. Coordination with the government of Alfheim must continue in order to promote such investigations…

Lee turned back to the pot. 
Which more or less tells us that ‘such investigations’ are either stalled or
 
just not happening at all,
 she thought. 
And nobody wants to push the subject, because financially
 
speaking, the Elves are just too damn powerful to annoy. So we all shrug and say, If their people
 
are killing each other, who cares? It’s their problem. All us non-immortals will just look the other
 
way and pretend nothing’s happening… officially.

Lee went rummaging under the sink for the colander, found it, put it in the sink, and dumped the spaghetti into it: shook it around until it was drained, then dumped it into the pan with the spaghetti sauce and stirred it all around. In her mind she suddenly found herself once again looking at the sidewalk around the corner from La Vida Loca, the red-brown seepage in the cracks of it, hard now, and beside her, slowly, in the dark, only partly seen, the body falling. Echoes of dil’Sorden’s last feelings from her sweep inside the club still haunted her: his fear of the bad thing that was probably going to happen, that was coming after him; his inability to escape from it; and finally his horror that it had, after all, happened so soon. He’d thought he’d have at least a few more days of life…and was blasted into the darkness barely a few breaths later.

Lee breathed out, flipped the report closed, got herself down a plate from the cupboard, and served out some of the spaghetti. 
Let them look away
, she thought. I’m not going to.

She sat down at the table, gazing out across the deck into her dark back yard, and ate her dinner, working out what to do next.

*

Lee found when she got in the next morning that her plans were going to have to wait, at least for a while.

Jok Castelain, the suspect, had been brought down from San Francisco overnight, and the processing people at Parker were attending to the formalities of booking him. “Which means,” Gelert said to Lee not more than a breath after she walked in the door, “that we’d better get on the road. They’re going to want us there to look him over when he makes his formal statement.”

“Who’s taking it?”

“Matt.”

“Oh no,” Lee said.

Gelert grinned at her. “Looks like Hagen has been warming up the DA’s phone,” he said.

“Oh no!” Lee said.

“Lee, why should you care?! Let him suffer.” Gelert sat there with his tail thumping against the ground, looking ready to enjoy the show.

“I’m above that kind of thing,” Lee said. 
I desperately hope!
 “Meanwhile, I had a long look at that report last night. I want you to look at it, too—I made some notes.”

Gelert twitched one ear forward and back. “Lee, you’re working too hard again. When are you going to take an evening off?”

“When we’re not busy,” Lee said, looking ruefully down at her desk: under the surface of it were swimming about twenty notes in various colors, all calls Mass had taken since coming in that morning. “Which I see happening sometime in the next decade.”

“Come on, Lee. Nuala’s been complaining that you haven’t seen the little ones in ages: they’ll be at university before you see them next, at the rate you’re going.”

“Gel, I really shouldn’t. And I don’t want to put her to any trouble…”

“You’re not… don’t be an idiot. Come on home with me tonight, we’ll have dinner and get caught up.”

Lee opened her mouth, and saw Gelert give her one of those looks meant to suggest that she was wasting her time. “All right,” she said. “But let’s get down to Parker and take a look at our suspect. Then I have some thoughts about those other murders that I want to run past you.”

Parker was as busy as ever as they made their way “upstream” past the waterfalls to Six, where the detention blocks were located. The two of them made their way among the desk carrels and glassed-off office blocks to the west side of the building. There, in one of the booking and assessment “pens,” a little complex of cubicles with metal and frosted glass walls, they turned into the outer reception office and found the receptionist, a broad dark lady called Magda, waiting for them with a pad. “Good morning, lanthanomancers,” she said. It was one of the reasons everyone remembered Magda: she never unbent her formality for anyone. “The assistant DA will be with you shortly, he’s on a call. Here’s the detainee you’re evaluating.” She handed them a pad.

Lee took it and examined the booking “mug shot.” The image she saw was a good match for the shadowy one from her Seeing—a blocky man in his mid-forties, crewcut, big-shouldered, fairly muscular: but there was a slope to the shoulders, too, and the face was blunt, pained, pinched, with weary eyes spaced wide, a big nose, a wide mouth, a thick neck. Gel leaned over to look at it, flicked his ears at her in preliminary agreement.

Lee looked at the arrest time on the docket. “They really did catch him awfully quick, didn’t they?” Lee said.

“The file says they had a tipoff,” said Magda.